MAKING BABIES FOR FRANCE: From the International Herald-Tribune

France's women have always enjoyed a reputation for bold and seductive elegance, and for intelligence, but now they have added to that evidence of a new willingness to combine work and motherhood, and a currently unparalleled ability to do so.

Their envied ability to eat what they want and stay slim thus is not the only paradox they present to their contemporaries in a Europe that, overall, confronts a grave demographic decline. Frenchwomen are now having as many babies, proportionately, as mothers in Catholic Ireland. Both countries have the highest birthrate in the European Union: 1.9 children per woman, as against an EU 25-nation average of 1.4 (a figure implying sharp population decline). At this rate, France would become the most populous country in the EU by midcentury.

France at the same time has the EU's highest female employment and professional activity. ...

It began in the 1970s, in a typical French government technocratic concern for developing the service sector, for which women seemed a prime labor source. Therefore free, full-time municipal creches, or nurseries for the very young, were expanded. Free public pre-kindergartens and canteens were vastly increased in number, as well as subsidized vacation camps during school holidays. Competition for places in these institutions remains high, and is increasingly subject to means tests, but this has simply pushed the development of cooperative creches organized by better-off families.

This had an important psychological as well as practical effect, legitimating the decision of young mothers to go back to work. There are also state financial incentives--family allowances, support for the volunteer creches formed by groups of mothers, and family tax benefits, many of which increase significantly with a third child.

The result is that more than in any other European country, French families now have three or more children. Germany and Switzerland also give generous family benefits, and in Sweden 77 percent of the children under 6 are in creches, but birth rates stay well under that in France. ...

After the 1968 social revolution, the rate of births outside marriage increased dramatically, even though the parents often either stayed together or formed new but relatively stable relationships. Today nearly half of French children are born outside marriage, but increasingly in "recomposed" families, largely free from social disapproval, and continuing to receive state benefits.

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posted by Eve at 6:48 PM VOTE

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